The USPS is starting to clean up their data and streamline mail entry so that it is not as manual and paper based. One part of this is that companies don’t need to open up permits at every facility location where their mail is verified, and can instead utilize a “Mail Anywhere” service. Entering mail is all being streamlined to a digital process where fewer eyes look at it and fewer hands touch or physically verify.
How Democrats Can Jumpstart Their Campaigns for the Future
Races are heating up, but there are a number of exciting opportunities for Democrats up and down the ticket. Here are some tips to jumpstart your Democratic campaign:
1. Do a thorough self-assessment. Are you ready to run? Does your family support you? Does your community support you? Have you done your politics? These are important questions to ask and know the answer to before you even file to run. If you can confidently answer, “yes” to these questions, you are ready to jumpstart your campaign.
2. Plan, plan, plan! The biggest mistake a candidate can make is failing to create a campaign plan. Your campaign plan should include a vote goal, budget, timeline, and message. Campaigns themselves are living, breathing animals once they heat up, but your campaign plan should pretty much stay the same.
3. Focus on the right stuff. It’s really easy to get caught up in the back and forth of a heated race and allow that to throw you off course. The best Democratic campaigns stay focused on directly communicating their message with targeted voters and turning them out. Period. Everything else is just noise.
4. Do the work. Running for office is hard. Doing what it takes to win is often even harder. Spending hours on the phone, asking for money every single day, is tough. Knocking on every targeted voters door is exhausting. But this is usually what it takes to win. The best way to jumpstart your campaign is to embrace the work and lean into it. You’re probably running because you want to represent your community—use this time to get to know them and ask them to join your campaign.
Some of the Most Innovative Nonprofit Marketing Campaigns to Inspire Your Creativity
Our third installment of our picks for innovative nonprofit marketing campaigns is here to inspire your creativity. This time, we have chosen four creative advertising campaigns that incorporate direct mail, video, and print advertising to convey important messages.
Die-Cuts Are a Great Way to Ensure Your Mail Stands out and Reinforces Its Message
Two things off the bat to consider are costs and timing. First, die-cuts add costs, so it's not something to suggest on every campaign. Second is the time factor, die-cuts do add time to the production of the piece, so this needs to be worked into the schedule.
Open up Your Campaign Toolbox, What Will You Find?
We understand what it’s like to operate a campaign on a tight budget, so we’ve found some free tools to include in your campaign toolbox to help you along the way. We hope you will find them useful as you launch your campaign or look for ways to better organize it. to ve clear no campaign tool will solve all of your campaigns problems. Whether fundraising for a nonprofit, managing an independent expenditure campaign, or seeking office, a few of these tools will surely help you along your way.
Everything You Were Afraid to Ask About Political Direct Mail Printing—Part 2
In part one of this series we talked about the characteristics of a good printer for political direct mail printing and how to find them. This week we’re going to talk about schedules and paper.
Online advocacy, digital advocacy whatever you call it we love it. These days, it seems like the options for any given online advocacy campaign are boundless. Do you cookie target? Geo-fence? Maybe hang out in the world of IP zone targeting? There’s always something new and different, and it can be overwhelming. One of the fairly simple choices you can make when you’re thinking about an online advocacy campaign is whether you want to buy through a specific publication, a network, or some combination of both.
While it’s true that the world of online advertising is fast-paced, and it certainly gives us information much more quickly than any other medium, banking on instantaneous traction is a good way to fall short of your goals. This is because online advertising is not a synonym for instant. Planning ahead will give you time to really define your goals and make sure your campaign has the right components and the right timeline to achieve them.
Where some sites, like Facebook, get ads up and running quickly with very little turnaround time, others, like Google, have an internal review process that can sometimes take a couple of business days. If you’re trying to run a online advertising campaign that lasts a week, and you’ve only given yourself 24 hours lead time, you will end up eating into some of that run time.
These days, everyone is online. And if your nonprofit isn’t online, it should be! It’s easy, cheap and one of the best ways to stay engaged with your supporters. Here are five things we think every nonprofit should be doing online.
1. Social Media: Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Tumblr. All of these are free for you to use, so why not? They are a fun, interactive way to communicate with your supporter base (who—spoiler alert—are already spending all their time on these platforms anyway). People love to promote causes they care about on Facebook especially, so make sure your cause is in the mix!
2. Online Fundraising: Online fundraising is a zillion times cheaper than other forms of fundraising. And many times, all it takes is adding a link to your website where people can donate. The trick is, you need to make sure that link is visible and easily accessible to people.
Over the last two Presidential election cycles, the Obama campaign has done some really innovative work online. There has been a lot of discussion in the progressive community about how other campaigns and organizations can take some of these tactics and apply them to their own causes. While it’s true that not all campaigns will have access to the same resources – budget, consultants, in-house staff – that the Obama campaign did, there are still some great lessons that can be applied to your campaign, regardless of size. One of the biggest takeaways from the campaign that can easily be applied to campaigns and organizations of all sizes is testing. The Obama campaign took testing to another level and tested everything from emails to online ads.
Our team is made up of amazing creative, organizational, and political consulting talent committed to achieving political and advocacy goals. We have worked for candidates and causes, big and small, all across the country.
